NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute will use a $30.6 million contract award from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases to run a collaborative initiative aimed at using genomics and translational research methods to study a number of diseases, the institute said recently.
SBRI will use the five-year contract to start the Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease, and it will work with researchers at the University of Washington, Battelle Northwest, and Decode Biostructures, which is a subsidiary of Decode Genetics.
The goal of the center is to determine the three-dimensional structures of proteins from bacterial, viral, fungal, and protozoan pathogens that cause emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, SBRI said, in order to develop a “blueprint” to be used in development of new drug treatments.
“By determining the three-dimensional structure of these proteins, we can identify important pockets or clefts and design small molecules which will disrupt their disease-causing function,” SBRI Principal Investigator Peter Myler said in a statement.
Myler aims for the center to solve 75 to 100 protein structures per year, with the results of the research being published and shared with scientists around the world.